Neo-Con and Global Warming parallels in hysteria and morality

I heard the Canadian and British prime ministers ring the bells of doom and gloom yesterday:

“Neither of us will be accused of exaggeration if we acknowledge that the most immediate test confronting us all is to avoid the devastating consequences of a return to global recession,” he said. Governments must commit to cutting their debts and deficits and to resisting protectionism or a recession won’t be avoided, he warned.
In his speech, Cameron issued similar warnings and said Canada and Britain must face this year’s biggest challenge together: securing global economic growth.

This neo-con plee to support government intervention in the economy parallels what I recently encountered from the global climate warming change crowd. Actually, we hear this urgency from them all of the time but a very curious article about a physicist named Ivar Giaever who resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society to condemn the group’s official stand on global warming went on to quote from the APS group’s website:

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Sounds desperate — like the desperation of the neo-cons trying to print more money and expand credit for their own benefit.

I can assume that global warming is occurring. However, the final statement from the APS quote does not logically follow from the preceding statements. The global warming crowd aggressively promotes ethical conclusions based solely on natural facts. That is insane on the face of it and insulting to anybody who understands the nature of science, philosophy and logical reasoning. There is no need to even question the integrity of their research because an ethical conclusion can not be deduced solely from science. These scientists are out of their league when they make policy prescriptions.

Both the neo-cons and the climatologists may be right. I am not sure. One thing of which I am certain is that I do not support the neo-con policy interventions. I thought it was an interesting parallel. I have attacked the hypocrisy of neo-con strategy of printing money many times before. Now, I want to dissect the climatological hysteria.

Why must we reduce emissions?

That is not a rhetorical question. I am not suggesting that emissions are all good. I am just questioning whether the pros of reducing emissions outweight the cons. There is no universally objective reason why we should reduce emissions.

I know this will sound callous and heartless but I do not believe that the responsibility for making these changes are with the general public. Thus, it is unfair to compel the public to finance or accommodate those changes because the underlying premise — i.e., global warming is bad — arguably is false if people are choosing to contribute to the problem. It is through human choice that we can identify what people prefer.

What if global warming is inevitable?

Maybe there is nothing we can do to stop these significant disruptions because maybe the global warming can not be stopped no matter what we do? That is a likely possibility because opponents will delay global warming policy interventions. Enough delays means that the doom and gloom scenario will happen sooner or later.

If global warming is inevitable, efforts to stop global warming would be wasteful. Those efforts would be put to better use if people were re-located to newly temperate parts of the planet.

Proof

Just like the neo-cons, the global warming crowd seriously insist that something must be done now. Not next year. Right now. If you question that urgency, you are treated like an evil demon. God forbid that they should continue to force their agenda — it is actually just a wily scheme to enrich the pocket-books of the elite parasitic rich class but for the sake of argument, we can pretend that their motives are genuine — on all of us, you can bet they will drain every last penny out of us to stop their imaginary apocalypse.

The burden of proof is on the global warming advocates that their policies really do achieve their goals. That is a huge burden. Currently, the climatologists are incapable of predicting the future with any precision nor can they predict the outcome of any preventive measures. Nobody has any idea what temperature changes will occur with any particular policy. Nobody has any idea what to do to hit a target temperature. The science is not mature enough yet to meet that burden of proof.

This will sound callous but I honestly do not believe the majority of the public really cares either. If my perception is right then who are we to insist that everybody does anything about it?

I tell you, I love the comforts and the accessibility of modern technology. I would hate to have grown up with the generation of my parents and I am sure that my children will say the same one day. My parents had to move away from their native land. Had they stayed in their homeland, they would be dead. So, the challenges of people in coastal regions today vis-a-vis the coincidence of global warming are the same that most of our forefathers faced before as did their forefathers before them. People moving away from destitute parts of the world represents the entire history of mankind. Yet, we are leaving them with more material and informational wealth with each passing day.

I keep hearing people say that we should leave the planet to the future generations in the best shape possible. Well, I think we can arguably say that we are doing that in spite of the environmental degradation. In balancing the pros against the cons, I think our choices in life are much greater now than before and that they will be even greater in the future.

Imagine this: One day, there will be a cure for cancer, the development of which was dependent on the same industrial economy that produced this supposedly man-made global warming. Future generations will be cured of cancer in exchange for having a degradation of the coastal regions. Maybe that is a reasonable trade-off for these future people — who knows? By the way, a lot of previously cold barren lands will likely become fertile and habitable. People may be happier and life may possibly be easier with the changes. The science says nothing about how people will judge the changes for themselves.

Imagine now this: one day BEFORE the cure of cancer is found, the industrial economy is stunted by anti-global warming policies and the cancer research institute had to be shut down.

My point is that with so much unknown in the economy and in the field of meteorology, it is foolish to insist that the future will be worse. We have no idea who people will subjectively evaluate their lifestyles.

One thing about global warming and economic interventions that bother me is the moral dissonance. In a culture where an obligation to protect a future person’s survival is not even extended to somebody as real and concrete as an unborn child, there is a bit of a dissonance in policy that demands EVERYBODY has a moral obligation to protect the survival of people who do not even exist.

Oh, well.

If global warming is really a threat worthy of being stopped, then go ahead and keep convincing people of this incontrovertible science but promote interventions in a voluntarist manner. For instance, take the owner of a polluting industrial plant to court. Sue him for dropping soot on neighboring land. Sue him to the point where his only response is to stop operations. Alternatively, buy up industrial plants and then shut them down. Keep doing that. Buy surrounding properties and limit access to the plants.

People should pay for their own charitable campaigns. We generally have the same attitude towards the diversity of religious practice. Dealing with global warming should be no different.

CBC provokes confusion in Canadian poultry market

Message to producers of consumer advocacy news-magazine-show “Marketplace” broadcast on CBC television:
Cook your chicken before you eat it. Duh. Yeah, you knew that already just like everybody else.

There is nothing exceptionally dangerous about Canadian chickens just because there are anti-biotic resistant bacteria on their flesh. The premise of the CBC program starts on the wrong foot: “Canadians are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.” and is a completely ignorant statement at best. Knowing the CBC, my bet is that the motivations behind this program are at their worst: deliberate fear-mongering and dishonest sensationalism.

The fact is that humans do not develop resistance to antibiotics. Only microbes develop antibiotic resistance. The premise of the “Marketplace” program is probably chosen to mislead the public into demonizing poultry farmers who use antibiotics.

There are probably better reasons to demonize the modern poultry industry — cruelty in the elevation is one of them — but antibiotic resistant bacteria is not an intelligent one.

Gail Shea and the PETA Pie

You know, I understand that some people look upon the “cream pie” as a time-honoured tradition as a method of protest in politics. Maybe I’m not so traditional about this. I don’t like it.

Today, while Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea was delivering a speech to open the Aquatic Life Research Facility in Burlington, a PETA zealot who was sitting in the front row stood up and hit the Minister in the face with a “tofu cream pie”.

Call me squirrely, but I call that assault.

Of course, the crazy zealot was dragged away presumably shrieking about the slaughter of seals, as if that hasn’t already been beaten into the ground 12 times over.

Protesting over your cause-du-jour is one thing, but taking it to the level of assault is another. This “unidentified” woman should be charged and jailed for assaulting a public official.

And for the record, I don’t approve of the pieing of Jean Chretien either. Yeah I know, I hate the guy, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to see him assaulted.

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Update: Revenge of the Curds courtesy of the National Post

Despots at Copenhagen

When blogging, there are times when you wonder if an analogy or illustration may be over the top or so far out that it will result in a barrage of legitimate criticism and, ultimately, a retraction or correction.

Then there are times when comparisons seem downright prescient.

Over in Copenhagen, we have Robert Mugabe, perhaps the most brutal and corrupt despot in Africa, whose life’s work has been to destroy the once-prosperous country of Zimbabwe, lecturing the West on the “hypocrisy” of its position on climate change. [...]

We have the government of China, which won’t allow its citizens free access to the Internet, complaining that the climate summit is “not transparent.”

We have Hugo Chavez, who took time off from shutting down Venezuela’s radio stations to fly to Denmark, complaining about western “dictatorship.” (If anyone back in Venezuela disagrees, he’ll toss them in jail).

–National Post, an absolutely smokin’ post by Kelly McParland.

It bears repeating that this is the morally inverted world of environmentalism.

Update: Pass me the caviar and vodka, Sergei.

Diane Francis, Global One Child Policy Fangirl, National Embarrassment

What is going on at the Financial Post? I was under the impression that in the context of Canadian media the Post was a relatively rational provider of economic news and opinion. (True, the day they hired Buzz Hargrove as a weekly columnist was the day I cancelled my subscription to the National Post, but I did qualify my last statement.)

Let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that a burgeoning global population is actually a problem. First of all, that’s got nothing to do with Western democracies. Our birth rates are already below replacement and continue to fall decade by decade. (For a more convincing explanation for why this is so than I can muster, please watch Lord Monckton’s presentation in Minneapolis. It’s long but it’s worth every minute of your time.) As it stands, we need higher levels of immigration just to maintain the assorted taxation pyramid schemes that pay for our current standard of living. Artificially reducing our already low birthrates only exacerbates this issue.

More importantly then, what Diane is proposing is encouraging Third World countries to adopt and enforce rigid population control policies. Countries like, let’s say, Sudan. We’ve seen how Sudan handles inconvenient populations. Throw forced abortions and sterilizations into the mix and what she’s proposing (intentionally or not) are dozens of little holocausts worldwide as dominant demographics seek to meet globally mandated targets by shifting the pressure to shrink onto their minority populations.

This is lunacy that would be unbecoming of some leftist hack in the back pages of the Star. Imagine my surprise seeing this spreading across the US blogs this morning only to discover that it’s the brainchild of a respected economics reporter at one of Canada’s more reasonable financial papers.

CRU leaks… meh

Just when you thought reasonable people might sit up and take notice of climategate… “hockey stick” graphs… at Copenhagen.

Confused? Unimpressed? Gobsmacked?  Well, follow the money.  Lorne Gunter:

The proof that the current climate summit in Copenhagen is not about environment and science, but rather about politics and ideology, can be seen in that fact that two weeks ago, some young computer programmer’s conscience got the better of him and he released computer code and emails exposing the skeleton of climate change. Yet almost no one in Copenhagen is talking about it.

It doesn’t matter that almost no one outside the climate change industry had heard of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia before the release. The CRU’s centrality to the mystery of Eco faith is undeniable. The CRU and GISS — NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies— are two of the four major repositories of temperature records in the world, the only two that show continuing warming and the two that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on for its forecasts of disaster.

Scientists from GISS are also implicated in the torquing of climate data revealed in the recent CRU leaks. This is not surprising given that the head of GISS, James Hansen, is Al Gore’s science guru. He testified on behalf of environmental terrorists who attacked a U.K. electrical station, saying they should not be convicted because their vandalism was in the public interest. He has called coal trains “death trains.”

Nevertheless, delegates in the Danish capital have practically glossed over the CRU “Climategate” leaks. That’s partly because they refuse to let the facts get in the way of their cause, but it’s mostly because Copenhagen isn’t about climate change as a physical phenomenon, but rather climate change as an opportunity to regulate people’s lives and incomes on a global scale (emphasis added).

Regulation == more government == more taxation == more socialism == less freedom.

Update 1 PM EST: A tidy point overlooked by some in George Monbiot’s anti-Canada screed, “A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.” This, based directly upon the pseudo-science behind said manufactured “hockey stick” and the foregone conclusions that a) carbon dioxide is absolutely to blame for the highly arguable increase in global temperatures and b) the contestable warming is unprecedented in history c) because of the industrial revolution.

I am inclined to laugh at the absurdity of the effort except for its serious angle, which is an indication of the horribly misguided zeal and incredible moral inversion amongst the AGW faithful, such as Mr. Monbiot. Consider for a moment that Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was merely suspended from the Commonwealth in 2002 despite its well-documented sham elections, rampant corruption, organized coercion, political assassinations, oppression of political dissent and overall economic oppression of its own people.  Canada is a model country to the world in politics and economics with an excellent justice system and a Charter and Constitution that is the envy of many, yet we have a relatively immense oil field in Northern Alberta, the development of which is causing some pollution. This makes us greater sinners than the Mugabe regime.

Ye gods.

Obligatory Copenhagen Post

Having not authored a post in a while, I figured I would rise today and wax polemic about Copenhagen, the massive  conference at which our government and all enviro-sinner nations, i.e. the West — of which Canada with its oilsands is the worst, we are told — will be compelled to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by set proportions regardless of the detrimental, yea disastrous, effects it might have on our economies, while also promising to transfer even more wealth from the ingenious companies and hard-working citizens of this nation via taxation to the governments and companies of poorer nations so they can combat “climate change” without hurting their economies.

Vox Day rightly argues that this is historically, scientifically, economically and politically insane.

It is historically insane because we know the planet was more than two degrees warmer as recently as 500 years ago. It is scientifically insane because we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the world is not warming according to any of the predictions based on models which are based on the idea that higher carbon dioxide levels produce higher temperatures. It is economically insane because it strengthens the contractionary forces that are already in the process of plunging the world into the greatest depression of the modern era. It is politically insane because it reverses more than 300 years of advancing human liberty and democracy.

Adding to the insanity is the specter of “approved” middlemen, a global governance structure, managing the transfer of wealth and enforcing environmental targets.  The rank hypocrisy on display at Copenhagen leads one to believe the scams resulting from global emissions management, some of which have already started to unfold in Europe, would make the UN Oil-for-Food scandal look like petty theft.

The first impression one receives of the summit is the sheer hypocrisy of it. Here are green campaigners who damn the rest of us for the size of our “carbon footprints” and challenge us each to reduce our carbon output by one tonne per year. Yet they themselves are flying in using a squadron of private jets, hiring a fleet of limousines and gorging themselves on expensive food flown in from around the world.

In all of Denmark, there are only a few of dozen limousines for hire. So more than 1,000 of the gas-guzzling, carbon-belching behemoths have been driven to Copenhagen from Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Since, at most, 140 heads of state and heads of government will attend the week-long conference, the bulk of these land yachts are being delivered for use by United Nations officials, the heads of environmental organizations and celebrities. All these people preach environmental sustainability for others, yet do not practice it themselves.

Digressing a bit, I suspect the governing “Conservatives” are thinking long and hard about their play at Copenhagen given their stronghold in Western Canada, oil country.  I’ve no doubt they’ve been inundated with queries and demands from the grassroots in light of the CRU leak, and I suspect they will take a beating on the hustings and in the pocketbook should they capitulate to the anti-freedom forces in Copenhagen and/or align Canada in any way with a carbon trading scheme.  If the CPC has any hope of forming a majority government, they’d best steer clear of these local landmines.

Back to Copenhagen, which, of course, is merely step one in the twisted world of enviro-fascism.  Oh, you didn’t hear?  Yes, the AGW prophet, Al Gore, served notice that the bar has already been raised.

Even if a deal is reached at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen next week it will only be the first step towards the far more radical cuts that are needed in global carbon emissions, Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, told The Times last night….

He insisted that the present goal set for Copenhagen of stabilising world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million — enough to prevent a rise in average global temperatures of no more than 2C — was insufficient and a safer target would be 350 parts per million.

“Insufficient.”  A fitting conclusion to an obligatory post about Copenhagen, for it reminds us that no matter what we do it will never be enough for the enviro-fascist leftards seeking to destroy Capitalism and Western freedom.  It reminds us that environmental policy has a fascist chassis and a socialist economic engine.  It reminds us that Copenhagen and all such global management endeavours are fundamentally about the transfer of power from the individual to the State.  It reminds us that freedom is being bartered under the guise of “being green.”  It reminds us to punish the CPC if they buckle.

Update 8 PM EST: Ice core context.  An absolute must see.  (Hat tip SDA.)  As has been mentioned previously, the issue is not whether we are currently in a warming period. It’s whether it is unprecedented and whether the cause is assuredly carbon dioxide and man-made emissions.

Californian Governor Proposes SkyNet To Save State

Well…not quite, but he did say that technology will be needed to save San Francisco from global warming. One is quick to propose that an army of T-1000s invading the city is more likely, in light of recent events…

Jim Prentice Not Swayed by ‘Climategate’

National Post is reporting that the Conservative government is not changing its opinion on the science behind climate change, despite the recent CRU email scandal:

OTTAWA – The Harper government said controversy surrounding hacked e-mails of climate scientists doesn’t change its concern about global warming or its position heading into a major international summit this month in Copenhagen.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said it was unfortunate that a prominent scientist was forced to resign because of revelations in the e-mails, but the government still believes the science is clear that human activity is causing climate change.

Take this for what it’s worth.  We all know that the words and deeds of politicians do not always coincide.  However, I’m cautiously thinking this is a good thing.  As Mark noted the other day, skepticism is healthy.  If the government is going to be a blind follower of conventional wisdom, that’s not good.  However, I don’t recall Stephen Harper ever sounding like Elizabeth May, so I’m guessing the Conservatives will never actually be leading the fight against climate change.

(Yeah, I hate the ‘-gate’ nomenclature for political scandals, but whatcha gonna do?)

(H/T: @stageleft.)

Blogs v. The Legacy Media

Occasionally the question comes up as to why I get my news from blogs instead of conventional big media news sources. Blogs are written by amateurs, they’re full of unsourced opinions, they’re poorly edited. Journalists writing for the legacy media are trained professionals following relatively strict codes of conduct, with layers of editing and access to vast amounts of well-sourced information. All true.

For an up-to-the-minute example of why blogs are superior to, for example, big newspapers, look no further than one of the least reputable of my favourite American blogs, Ace of Spades HQ: ClimateGate gets real legs – London Times reports on CRU’s thrown away raw data:

Their data ditching is actually old, high profile coverage of it and its implications, not so old.

Exactly my point. I read about the data loss weeks before the CRU email scandal broke. People relying on the London Times are only reading about this today.

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